Pictures of Earth by Planetary Spacecraft

Lunar Orbiter sent back the first photo of Earth over the Moon, but it was the Apollo program that produced the first widely publicized views of Earth as a colorful marble floating in black space, images that revolutionized public perception of our fragile planet. At the same time, Soviet Zond spacecraft were capturing similarly dramatic images. Later, Clementine reprised these views. As spacecraft began to launch on journeys to more distant planets, never to return, their mission controllers often commanded them to take departing views of Earth and the Moon. Mariner 10 and Voyager 1 both took such snapshots, as did Mars Odyssey and Venus Express. Other spacecraft traveling to eventual orbit around other planets required one or more gravity-assist flybys of Earth; a year or more after their launches, Galileo, Hayabusa, Rosetta, and MESSENGER returned to the neighborhood, shooting photos and even movies as they flew by. Some planetary travelers -- like Voyager 1, Mars Global Surveyor, Cassini, Deep Impact, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter -- were even able to turn toward Earth and capture distant glimpses of their home planets from their eventual destinations. Wthe dawning of an International Lunar Decade and multiple missions returning to the Moon, new views came in from Kaguya, Chandrayaan-1, and Chang'E. Most recently, GRAIL's little MoonKAM has returned photos of Earth from the Moon.

Below are just a few of these photos. Over time, more images will be added.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter performed a challenging feat, catching the Moon's shadow crossing the full Earth's disk a total of four times during the May 12, 2012 solar eclipse. Click here for an animation of all four images. Visit the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera website to learn more about how it was taken.

This is a mosaic of 11 images taken during a ten-minute period near 5:45 p.m. PST Dec. 8, 1990. The picture spans about 1,600 miles across the south polar latitudes of our planet. The morning day/night terminator is toward the right. The South Pole is out of sight below the picture; the visible areas of Antarctica are those lying generally south of South America. The violet-blue envelope of Earth's atmosphere is prominent along the limb to the left. At lower left, the dark blue Amundsen Sea lies to the left of the Walgreen and Bakutis Coasts. Beyond it, Peter Island reacts with the winds to produce a striking pattern of atmospheric waves.

The MESSENGER spacecraft, en route to Mercury, gets a gravity boost by flying by the home planet. With its jewel-like seas and clouds, it is immediately clear that this world is unique in the Solar System.

On October 1, 2010, shortly after launch, Chang'E 2 deploys its solar panels, an event witnessed by an engineering camera. In this video, a computer simulation shows the event and the position of the camera; then the video from the onboard camera is shown. The spring-deployed panels sway back and forth gently after deployment. After the swaying has damped, the spacecraft rolls and suddenly the brilliant ball of Earth swings into view. The camera's exposure adjusts for the brightness of Earth's clouds.

This unusual photo of a crescent Earth was taken by the OSIRIS wide-angle camera on Rosetta about two hours before closest approach on its second Earth flyby, at 19:05 UTC on November 13, 2007. Antarctica lies at the bottom of the crescent.

This picture of a crescent-shaped Earth and Moon -- the first of its kind ever taken by a spacecraft -- was recorded Sept. 18, 1977, by Voyager 1 when it was 11.66 million kilometers (7.25 million miles) from Earth.

On December 16, 1992, eight days after its encounter with Earth, the Galileo spacecraft looked back from a distance of about 6.2 million kilometers to capture this remarkable view of the Moon in orbit about Earth.

This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by JunoCam on the Juno spacecraft, three weeks after its August 5 launch. On August 26, 2011, the spacecraft was already almost 10 million kilometers away from the Earth-Moon system.

When NASA's Juno spacecraft flew past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, it received a boost in speed of more than 8,800 mph (about 7.3 kilometer per second), which set it on course for a July 4, 2016, rendezvous with Jupiter.
One of Juno's sensors, a special kind of camera optimized to track faint stars, also had a unique view of the Earth-moon system. The result was an intriguing, low-resolution glimpse of what our world would look like to a visitor from afar.

The Chang'e 5 test vehicle service module took this photo of Earth and the Moon together on November 9, a week after successfully returning the sample capsule. The Moon's surface is quite dark compared to Earth's bright clouds.

Earth and the Moon seen on December 8, 1992, by the Galileo spacecraft. The images have been processed to produce color similar to what the human eye would see; the Moon really is that much darker and redder than Earth.

The pair of bright star-like features in the upper panel are not stars at all, but the Earth and Moon! MESSENGER took the photo on July 19, 2013, from a distance of 98 million kilometers. Earth and Moon are both overexposed; the image was part of a long-exposure search for satellites around Mercury.

As Akatsuki sped away from Earth, it captured "First Light" images with its optical instruments pointed at its home planet in an extreme UV phase. This view is from the UVI camera, which captures images at a near-ultraviolet wavelength of 365 nanometers.

Chandrayaan-1 took this photo of Earth from Earth orbit on October 29, 2008 at 07:00 UTC. Near the center of the disk is the northwestern coast of Australia; the Sun glints off the Indian Ocean adjacent to that coast. This image has been flipped horizontally from its originally published version to match the proper orientation.

Hayabusa snapped this image of Earth during its flyby on May 18, 2004 at 15:00 UTC. Four of Earth's continents are clearly visible -- North America at left, South America at the bottom, Africa on the right, and eastern Europe above it.

As it flew past Earth, Juno's JunoCam got its first opportunity to image a colorful planet. In this photo, taken at 19:03 on October 9, 2013 -- 12 minutes before closest approach -- you can see the west coast of South America.

As it flew past Earth, Juno's JunoCam got its first opportunity to image a colorful planet. In this photo, taken at 12:12 on October 9, 2013, the Sun glints from the ocean off the east coast of South America.

Juno took this photo of Earth just minutes before closest approach, at 19:15 on October 9, 2013 UT. The image was taken through an infrared filter and spans the terminator or day-night boundary. The oblique sunlight picks out the height of clouds over the south Atlantic Ocean.

Kaguya took this photo of Earth using its HDTV camera from a distance of 110,000 kilometers (68,000 miles). It is the farthest that any HDTV camera has ever traveled from Earth. This is a still image, but it was taken as part of a test of the camera's a

This pair of images represents the same viewpoint on Earth through two different sets of filters on the MESSENGER spacecraft. On top, three filters in red, green, and blue wavelengths were combined to make an image that approximates what the human eye would see. The green mass at the center is the Amazon jungle of South America. The deserts of West Africa are just visible on the edge of the Earth's disk below and to the right of South America. The bottom image is "pushed" into the near infrared; instead of red, green, and blue, it is composed of images taken through near-infrared, red, and green filters. Chlorophyll, the green pigment in plant leaves, is very strongly reflective at near infrared wavelengths, much more so than it is in red or green wavelengths, so the vegetated parts of Earth burst into bright red color.

As Galileo receded from its first flyby of Earth on December 11 and 12, 1990, it took images of Earth in six different filters almost every minute over a 25-hour period. The animation here includes images taken once an hour, representing about a tenth of the full number of frames.

Curiosity captured three images of Earth setting in the western sky after sunset on sol 529 with its higher-resolution Mastcam-100. Here, the images have been subtracted to cancel out noise in the camera detector, revealing Earth's bright dot in motion.

On August 23, 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. While a remarkable image at the time, the full resolution of the image was never retrieved from the data stored from the mission. In 2008, this earthrise image was restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center. They obtained the original data tapes from the mission (the last surviving set) and restored original FR-900 tape drives to operational condition using both 60s era parts and modern electronics. A 1.2 GB full resolution version of the image is available from NASA here.

On February 1, 2014, as Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter approached the north pole, it rotated to catch a view of Earth rising above 180-kilometer Rozhdestvenskiy crater. Twelve such Earthrises happen each day for the spacecraft, which is in a polar orbit around the Moon.

Earth rose over the lunar horizon as Apollo 8 completed the first manned trip behind the far side of the Moon. The mission also returned the first live television coverage of the lunar surface, on December 24, 1968.

Zond 7 flew past the Moon, taking this sequence of images of Earth setting behind the lunar limb, on August 9, 1969. The sequence actually consists of only three images; the second one was simulated from data in the others to even out the Earthset sequence.

As Galileo receded from its ssecond flyby of Earth on December 16 and 17, 1992, it captured this sequence of Earth rotating as the Moon zipped by on its orbit. There are 56 frames in total, each separated by 15 minutes, spanning about 14 hours.

These images were taken during Galileo's first Earth flyby. In each frame, the continent of Antarctica is visible at the bottom of the globe. South America may be seen in the first frame (top left), the great Pacific Ocean in the second (bottom left), India at the top and Australia to the right in the third (top right), and Africa in the fourth (bottom right).

This is the final photo captured by Hayabusa as it approached its reentry into Earth's atmosphere. It was taken roughly an hour before the end of the mission, after it had already released the sample capsule.

One of the most famous images of the twentieth century, this view of the fully lit globe of Earth was taken from Apollo 17 shortly after its launch on December 7, 1972. The full view was enabled by the fortuitous alignment of Earth, spacecraft, and the Sun.

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the Sun's blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

From orbit at Mercury, MESSENGER captured 31 photos of Earth and the Moon between 9:18 and 10:18 UTC. As MESSENGER watched, the Moon crossed into Earth's shadow, in a lunar eclipse that was witnessed by much of North America and the Pacific Ocean.

As MESSENGER retreated from its August 2, 2005 flyby of Earth, it captured a full day's worth of images of Earth's receding crescent, which were assembled into a movie. This animation contains only 17 of the 358 frames captured by MESSENGER.

As Rosetta flew past Earth for the first of two gravity-assist flybys on March 3, 2005, one of its Navigation Cameras caught the Moon rising above the Pacific. The photo was taken at 22:06 UTC, just three minutes before its closest approach.

After its closest approach to Earth, Rosetta looked back and took a number of images using the spacecraft's Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC). This image, acquired November 15, 2007, is a color composite of the NAC Orange, Green, and Blue filters. At the bottom, the continent of Australia can be seen clearly.

Hayabusa's star tracker shot this photo of the Earth-Moon system on May 12, 2010, within 13.5 million kilometers of its home world. The spacecraft is aimed for a June 13 return of its sample capsule to Earth. The star tracker is designed to photograph stars, so targets as bright as the Moon and Earth are overpoweringly bright. Neither body actually subtends more than one pixel; their apparent size results from their bright points of light spilling over into adjacent pixels. However, the star tracker successfully separates the light of the Moon and Earth, resolving them as distinct points of bright light.

Junocam took this image during its passage over the Earth's night side, and caught the lights of Cape Town, South Africa. The bright band across the image is the limb of the earth, with the Sun illuminating the highest reaches of the atmosphere.

These views of Earth and the Moon were captured by the Advanced Stellar Compass, or star tracker camera, on Juno as the spacecraft approached for its October 9 flyby of Earth. The sequence begins on October 6. The original images are monochrome; faint coloration has been added by converting the measured grayscale values into false colors matching a true color image of Earth.

As part of its EPOXI mission, Deep Impact spent 24 hours over May 28 and 29, 2008, watching Earth from a distance of 50 million kilometers. During that time, the Moon transited Earth as seen from the spacecraft. The view was captured using Deep Impact's High Resolution Imager, which had a serious blurring problem; efforts to reduce the blurring have introduced some other artifacts, like the concentric ringing on the Moon.

As part of its EPOXI mission, Deep Impact spent 24 hours over May 28 and 29, 2008, watching Earth from a distance of 50 million kilometers. During that time, the Moon transited Earth as seen from the spacecraft. The view was captured using Deep Impact's High Resolution Imager, which had a serious blurring problem; efforts to reduce the blurring have introduced some other artifacts, like the concentric rings on the Moon. The full sequence covers 24 hours, a full rotation of Earth.

As part of its EPOXI mission, Deep Impact spent 24 hours over May 28 and 29, 2008, watching Earth from a distance of 50 million kilometers. During that time, the Moon transited Earth as seen from the spacecraft. The view was captured using Deep Impact's High Resolution Imager, which had a serious blurring problem; efforts to reduce the blurring have introduced some other artifacts, like the concentric rings on the Moon. These eight images were captured about half an hour apart, so the whole sequence spans about 3.5 hours.

This image of Earth is one of 60 frames taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990 from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In the image the Earth is a mere point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Our planet was caught in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the Sun. This image is part of Voyager 1's final photographic assignment which captured family portraits of the Sun and planets.

Juno took these photos of Earth from its Junocam during its October 9, 2013 flyby. The left and right images are in color; the center one was taken through a filter at an infrared wavelength in which methane is strongly absorbing. At Earth, the main effect of using that filter is to see vegetated areas as being relatively bright, since vegetation is strongly reflective in the near-infrared.

On September 18, 1968, Zond-5 became the first spacecraft to circle the Moon and return to land on Earth. It photographed Earth from a distance of 90,000 kilometers, but a subsequent malfunction of the orientation system prevented it from photographing the Moon.

Zond-6 flew around the Moon on November 14, 1968. It carried the AFA-BAM camera with a 400-millimeter objecitve, shooting on 13 by 18-centimeter frames of isopanchromatic film. A session of 111 frames was performed at a distance of 9,290-6,843 km, and another session of 58 frames from 2,660-2,430 km. A crash landing on Earth flattened and broke open the film canister, but 52 photographs were recovered with some degree of laceration and fogging. Only a few fragments of Zond-6 images have been published. Poor print quality, not film damage, is the reason for the low quality of this image.

Zond-8 flew by the Moon on October 24, 1970 and returned to Earth with high quality photographs, some from as close as 1,350 km. Images were shot with the 400 mm AFA-BAM camera, on 13 by 18-centimeter frames of isopanchromatic film. A session of 20 full-Moon pictures was followed by a session of 78 lunar-surface pictures (including 17 shots of Earth over the lunar horizon).

Zond-8 flew by the Moon on October 24, 1970 and returned to Earth with high quality photographs, some from as close as 1,350 km. Images were shot with the 400 mm AFA-BAM camera, on 13 by 18-centimeter frames of isopanchromatic film. A session of 20 full-Moon pictures was followed by a session of 78 lunar-surface pictures (including 17 shots of Earth over the lunar horizon).